The Ecology of Dress in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

This volume posits that clothing in the early modern period was conceived of as the prime interface between the human body and its multiple environments. Both a second skin and a human-made artefact, dress can indeed be considered as the most immediate site for the elaboration of any sort of ecology, in its etymological sense of a ‘discourse’ of the oikos, or of the place we inhabit. This collection shows how early modern English literature, and drama in particular, interrogates the crucial relationship between humans and the world that surrounds them in its staging of dress. It also argues that the theatrical productions of the time derived much of their creative energy from this process, by which climates and their effects were translated and embodied through dress on the mediating stage. Its various chapters study early modern clothes in their ecosystems and challenge the inside/outside, natural/artificial and body/environment binaries.